Thursday, August 25, 2011

I've been flensing the carcass of the most convenient Borders, and just bought this last night for slightly less than you can get it from an Amazon vendor, at least...there aren't Too many collections that range quite as widely over a pop landscape, even given how many of the just-out-of-the-garage bands, when they were, sound alike on disc two. Meanwhile, while it was unnecessary to offer all the recordings in mono (a common complaint about this package), as opposed to most which were recorded only in mono, and the sleeves for the discs are less than optimal for protection, this does give a sense of the "scene" in those years, as well as offering a decent selection of orphaned or otherwise rare items...so, if this music is of interest, here's an opportunity to find The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band cheek by jowl with the Bobby Fuller Four...and, happily, that's not the 1980s Knack, below. But, yes, that Kim Fowley. (Somehow, I thought Spirit was a San Francisco band...seems more fitting, somehow.) For that matter, it's a pretty rare album which features both Beefheart and the Magic Band and the Mamas and Papas...though the lack of The Mothers of Invention is another flaw (I can only imagine there was some intransigence on the part of the copyright holders)...

Track Listings
Disc: 1
1. Riot On Sunset Strip (The Standells)
2. You Movin' (The Byrds)
3. You I'll Be Following (Love)
4. Dr. Stone (The Leaves)
5. Go And Say Goodbye (Buffalo Springfield)
6. Zig Zag Wanderer (Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band)
7. Gentle As It May Seem (Iron Butterfly)
8. Candy Cane Madness (Lowell George & The Factory)
9. If You Want This Love (The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band)
10. Baby, My Heart (The Bobby Fuller Four)
11. All Night Long (The Palace Guard)
12. It's Gonna Rain (Sonny & Cher)
13. For My Own (The Guilloteens)
14. Take A Giant Step (The Rising Sons)
15. One Too Many Mornings (The Association)
16. Time Waits For No One (The Knack)
17. Take It As It Comes (The Doors)
18. Pulsating Dream (Kaleidoscope)
19. Tripmaker (The Seeds)
20. The People In Me (The Music Machine)
21. Saturday's Son (The Sons Of Adam)
22. Eventually (The Peanut Butter Conspiracy)
23. Swim (Penny Arkade)
24. The Third Eye (The Joint Effort)
25. Girl In Your Eye (Spirit)

That's today's new discount range nationally...they were starting to put those signs up as I left at closing last night (the last day of three wherein cardholders could use their cards again for 15% off the totals).

It's quite the temptation for a junkie like myself. I hope, for selfish and unselfish reasons, that Books-A-Million takes the Bryn Mawr Borders space...Bryn Mawr being pretty good territory for bookselling.

Well, Yvette, a lot of these are notably obscure, even when recorded by major or commercially potent artists. The second disk includes a few hit-makers, such as the Turtles, but is mostly, as noted, just out of the garage bunches of kids, mixed in with a few vets who never made much of a national splash. And if you never dug into the PREFLYTE album or the Byrds' complete works assemblies, it was easy to miss at least one or two of the Byrds' tracks here...for obvious example...